Manufacturing Engineering

Are you guilty of believing the aluminum extrusion myth? Many design engineers looking for cost savings often overlook extruded aluminum manufacturing for stamped or machined parts, believing it to be an expensive and/or challenging process. This can be a costly mistake. Extruded aluminum allows manufacturers to produce complex profiles with as few parts as one and can save companies real money on production and overall product life cycle costs.

With the August 1985 issue, Cutting Tool Engineering launched a decade-long series of articles titled, "History of Tools." The first installment, which you can download and read by clicking here, began as the ultimate Throwback Thursday endeavor: urging readers with their eyes on the future to recall the machine tool industry's humble beginnings. So, yeah, The Stone Age.

Earlier this week we shared the conclusions of the McKinsey Report, which concluded that it may be possible for U.S. manufacturing to grow by 20 percent and add more than 2 million jobs by 2025. That was the good news. It can only happen, however, if manufacturers embrace Industry 4.0 technology. The Integr8 conference in Detroit showed how to get started.